It's interesting how the message changes, depending on the audience.
Here:
-Increase the age of sexual debut
-Reduce the number of sexual partners
www.waittraining.org: Although the title of the main page is "Abstinence Education Curriculum, Teen Relationships, Pregnancy Prevention, Positive Youth Development and Marriage Communication Seminars," somehow these topics have been omitted from the list of WAIT Training Curriculum objectives.
Here:
-Increase the number of students who are willing to return to a healthy choice even if they have been sexually active
Curriculum objectives:
The value of starting over
"We also offer:"
Sexual Cessation trainings for working with sexually active youth
(Even Ann Landers recognized the futility in this.)
Curriculum objectives:
Marriage preparation education
Without teaching about contraception? (There is also no mention of contraception in the "marriage education workshop" objectives.)
Finally,
Waiting until marriage is not a measureable goal and no one in our agency desires to be the sex police to follow a student to marriage.
Of course this is measurable--studies show that 90 to 95% of the population has sex before marriage. WAIT Training apparently does not want to be held accountable for program ineffectiveness.
###
With a bit of Googling, interesting tidbits about this Curriculum can be found.
In a 2007 article in The Nation entitled Opportunities in Abstinence Training, Barbara Ehrenreich described a passage in the curriculum using frozen waffles and spaghetti noodles as an analogy to the differences between the brains of men and women. This essay discusses the source cited (which doesn't actually mention waffles or spaghetti) and describes how the original research (that was horribly mischaracterized in the Curriculum) was refuted in 1997.
Oddly enough, the Curriculum is no longer available for download from their website.
I find it highly amusing that apparently, one can learn all one needs to know about human relationships from a children's playground rhyme. No better than getting a sexual education from a collection of Bronze Age fables, I suppose. The assertion that everyone in the entire world is and wants to be heterosexual, fecund, monogamous and married is absurd, which is the point anon99 is making, despite your spectacular failure to comprehend it.
Married, when you even admitted that most marriages fail. To me, that would be a huge indicator that the "expected life plan" of marriage and kids does not work most of the time and it's just a case of people caving to societal pressure to conform. We need to accept that there are more ways and more things in life than settling down and sprogging. You, on the other hand, believe that brainwashing people at a younger age to believe that marriage and kids is all they can do, instead of acknowledging that this expectation is the problem in the first instance.
I can't imagine being so obsessed with sex that I'd create a special club with entire syllabusses dedicated to avoiding it. I've always thought of abstinence-only clubs as a sort of dysfunctional Alcoholics Anonymous, where they follow a twelve-step plan to make the neurosis worse instead of better.
Dear Anonymous 99,
I am delighted to know that you will be teaching your daughter these life skills that are in WAIT Training. The research is clear. Parents are the BEST ones to provide this information because they are the most influential. Having an involved parent like you to teach these concepts helps build protective factors in children. So.. I applaud you!
The goals we have outlined for WAIT Training are measurable and quantifiable.
The goals of WAIT Training are to:
-Increase the age of sexual debut
-Reduce the number of sexual partners
-Reduce non marital pregnancy rates
-Reduce sexually transmitted infections and diseases
-Reduce dating and intimate partner violence
-Reduce the number of students who use drugs and alcohol
-Increase the number of students who are willing to return to a healthy choice even if they have been sexually active
-Increase the number of students who are sexually active who get tested for STDs
-Increase the number of sexually active students who get counseled by a medical professional in a clinical setting to use risk reducers consistently and correctly.
-Increase the number of students who have the knowledge and skills to have healthy relationships
Increase the number of students who value a lifetime committed monogamous love relationship commonly known as marriage.
Waiting until marriage is not a measureable goal and no one in our agency desires to be the sex police to follow a student to marriage. WAIT Training takes an incremental approach to behavior change and social norming.
Waiting until and in preparation for marraige IS the optimal health choice and a worthwhile health goal for some. However, calling it absurd is like calling the United Nations absurd. The goal of the United Nations is world peace, is it not? Have we EVER had world peace? No we have not...but it continues to be a noble and worthwhile goal.
What we are trying to accomplish is this.. approximately 40% (and in some communities it is 70 %) of babies are born into families where there is no marriage. Of the 60% that are born into marriages 50% of those marriages fracture and dissolve. A safe and stable home is something all children need.
This is becoming the social norm. Many of the students we serve do not even know they have the option to wait and be loved and cherished. We are trying to teach them soemthing called success sequenceing. We used to know this instinctively. Remember this? Dick and Jane sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. That is not a jingle our children learn any more.
If we are going to do the best we can do for a child's sake, the emperical data is robust and plentiful, that to reduce poverty, drama, disease and dysfunction, we must be helpful in creating safe and stable homes and families.
I am sorry you felt like you were being bullied into stating your name. That was not my intent. I now understand you have your reasons for staying anonymous.
Joneen, I have someone in mind to teach her all those things. ME. Thanks but no thanks. Financial literacy? Really? You're all experts at that too? You're program is designed to teach young people to WAIT until they're married to have sex. Are you denying that's the main purpose? The average age of first marriage today is 26 or 27 Joneen. Even for those young people who do get married you're placing absurd expectations on them. I've seen first hand the pain and anguish of a man in his late twenties who was struggling with this. Maybe you don't realize that girls in Biblical times typically married when they were just 13. Waiting until marriage then was pretty easy I think we could agree. I find you wanting to teach my daughter this ancient custom in our modern world absurd. And BTW I'm not going to let you bully me into giving you my name. I've had MANY disagreements with people on this board and I don't recall anyone calling me out like this. I have my reasons for remaining anonymous and most people seem to respect that.
She can learn all those things and more without your silly little program. I have no doubt you believe in what you're doing, but the scope of what you teach and how you teach it is too limited and burdened with harmful stereotypes for what some people want for their young ones.
And with that asinine statement you have proven Heather well-justified in ignoring you. How utterly 19th century. But here's a brief article in case you want to persist in acting like a social throwback.
Hmmm...interesting double standard. If you're SO CONCERNED about universal human equality and are SO SURE that gay people have the right to adopt through an agency that declines to help that couple on religious grounds, than why don't you know for a fact that disabled people are entitled to the same non-discrimination protections as gay people iin the adoption process?
No one is saying that anyone has a 'right to adopt' except you. That's something you made up and it isn't the issue. The issue is that the Catholic church does not have a 'religious' right to discriminate. The problem was that the Catholic church refused to even consider gay and lesbian couples who were willing to provide stable, loving homes for hard to place children and they refused despite the fact that the state of MA had a non-discrimination clause in the legally binding contract The Church had signed. In other words (and please pay attention to the title of the original post) The Church was/is claiming itself was/is above the law. You appear to be arguing that The Church should be above the law, should be allowed to discriminate on 'religious' grounds' AND force the rest of us to pay for it. good luck with that.
I must say that this business of trying to cover up your and your church's ignorance and bigotry by using disabled folks as a shield is a rhetorical habit you have which I find fairly disgusting.
The only difference between the American anti-abortion movement and the Taliban is about 8,000 miles.
You have to know that I every time buy essays
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How sad for your daughter that you will not allow her to learn the science of healthy relationships, the stages of attachment, the stages of commitment, the steps of intimacy, the multi-dimensions of building intimacy with herself and others, identifying her love language, helping her find her voice in relation to communicating feelings and setting boundaries, valuing her amazing personality;learning how to be intentional as she decides rather than slides into relationships, life mapping, conflict resolution, creative problem solving, decsion making, dealing with peer pressure,strategies to aviod drugs and alcohol, media and financial literacy and partner selection strategies. These are just some of the few life skills your daughter would learn in WAIT Training.
How would you know what my views are? Do you know me? Have you read through the curriculum? Have you talked with parents and students who have been through it? Do
you know the research behind the development of this program? Have you made an effort to educate yourself? From the angry tone of this blog entry, it would seem to me that the answers to these questions are a resounding NO.
Now... who is being dogmatic, unbending, intolerant, discriminatory and judgmental?
If you would really like to have a dialogue rather than sounding shrill, I suggest you be courageous and state your name rather than being annoymous.
Too attached to Edward Cullen for your feminist sensibilities? Just in time for Thanksgiving, here's an unorthodox guide to kicking the Twilight habit.
The best way to be an ally and a support to anyone often starts with questions like "How can I support you?" or "What do you want and need from me in this?" Then you listen to the answers and respond accordingly.
As Thanksgiving Day quickly approaches, we want to take a moment to reflect on how grateful we are for the people who help make RH Reality Check what it is today.
The Stupak furor has obscured the shocking fertility and family control provisions in current health care legislation. The House bill actually authorizes a plan to monitor the childbearing decisions and family lives of low-income women.
Revisions in Peru's Penal Code may lead to decriminalizing abortion in cases of rape or severe disability of the fetus. But conservative political and religious forces are, predictably, opposing these changes.
Rights advocates can forget that there is an entire world of potential allies out there we may be missing because we are not effectively communicating with them.
Muslim women in India are caught between the strictures of family and personal law and persistent discrimination against them as women from both the Indian government and society writ large.
Opponents and supporters of women's choices in childbearing agreed early on, in theory, to maintain the “status quo” with "abortion neutral" health care legislation. The Senate bill achieves this goal; the House bill does not.
An epidemic of sexually transmitted infections in the U.S. disproportionately affects blacks, youth, gays and the poor. Talking openly about sex is the first step in prevention.
Bethany Cajúne, pregnant and in a substance abuse recovery program, was jailed for 19 days for traffic violations. But officials repeatedly denied her a drug necessary to her recovery, putting her health and the life of her fetus at risk.
No one reading this has forgotten that the House passed a healthcare “reform” bill that includes the Stupak Amendment. Here's a speech Congressman Stupak needs to hear.
In a strange twist, Nevada anti-choice groups, complaining that the wording of a "personhood" amendment to establish civil rights for fertilized eggs is too vague, are on the same side as Planned Parenthood and ACLU.
I'm a transgendered sex worker, and I want to not get killed for who I am or what I do. As our death count rises, I beg that you consider your prejudices around gender, and let us live in peace. I'm literally begging for my life.
In examining rooms, we see women in terrible pain, but their suffering doesn’t count in Stupak/Pitts world. By banishing abortion from the reform bill, the amendment punishes women who need to end unwanted or unhealthy pregnancies.
With the Stupak amendment literally and symbolically stripping women of equal status, the movie "Precious" presents, in grim detail, the way race, class and bias render a woman's body simultaneously invisible and subject to abuse.
The CDC releases its annual "Abortion Surveillance" report on abortion in the United States, for 2006. The report says the surveillance provides critical information needed to evaluate programs aimed at preventing unintended pregnancy.
"Crisis pregnancy" centers in Baltimore must now display signs stating they do not provide abortions or birth-control referrals under a measure approved by the City Council Monday night and thought to be the first of its kind in the nation."
In the Weekly Pulse, Lindsay Beyerstein reports on this week's developments on health care reform, the public option, and new recommendations on mammogram screening for breast cancer detection.
It's interesting how the message changes, depending on the audience.
Here:
www.waittraining.org: Although the title of the main page is "Abstinence Education Curriculum, Teen Relationships, Pregnancy Prevention, Positive Youth Development and Marriage Communication Seminars," somehow these topics have been omitted from the list of WAIT Training Curriculum objectives.
Here:
Curriculum objectives:
"We also offer:"
(Even Ann Landers recognized the futility in this.)
Curriculum objectives:
Without teaching about contraception? (There is also no mention of contraception in the "marriage education workshop" objectives.)
Finally,
Of course this is measurable--studies show that 90 to 95% of the population has sex before marriage. WAIT Training apparently does not want to be held accountable for program ineffectiveness.
###
With a bit of Googling, interesting tidbits about this Curriculum can be found.
In a 2007 article in The Nation entitled Opportunities in Abstinence Training, Barbara Ehrenreich described a passage in the curriculum using frozen waffles and spaghetti noodles as an analogy to the differences between the brains of men and women. This essay discusses the source cited (which doesn't actually mention waffles or spaghetti) and describes how the original research (that was horribly mischaracterized in the Curriculum) was refuted in 1997.
Oddly enough, the Curriculum is no longer available for download from their website.
[edited for formatting]
I find it highly amusing that apparently, one can learn all one needs to know about human relationships from a children's playground rhyme. No better than getting a sexual education from a collection of Bronze Age fables, I suppose. The assertion that everyone in the entire world is and wants to be heterosexual, fecund, monogamous and married is absurd, which is the point anon99 is making, despite your spectacular failure to comprehend it.
Married, when you even admitted that most marriages fail. To me, that would be a huge indicator that the "expected life plan" of marriage and kids does not work most of the time and it's just a case of people caving to societal pressure to conform. We need to accept that there are more ways and more things in life than settling down and sprogging. You, on the other hand, believe that brainwashing people at a younger age to believe that marriage and kids is all they can do, instead of acknowledging that this expectation is the problem in the first instance.
I can't imagine being so obsessed with sex that I'd create a special club with entire syllabusses dedicated to avoiding it. I've always thought of abstinence-only clubs as a sort of dysfunctional Alcoholics Anonymous, where they follow a twelve-step plan to make the neurosis worse instead of better.
Dear Anonymous 99,
I am delighted to know that you will be teaching your daughter these life skills that are in WAIT Training. The research is clear. Parents are the BEST ones to provide this information because they are the most influential. Having an involved parent like you to teach these concepts helps build protective factors in children. So.. I applaud you!
The goals we have outlined for WAIT Training are measurable and quantifiable.
The goals of WAIT Training are to:
-Increase the age of sexual debut
-Reduce the number of sexual partners
-Reduce non marital pregnancy rates
-Reduce sexually transmitted infections and diseases
-Reduce dating and intimate partner violence
-Reduce the number of students who use drugs and alcohol
-Increase the number of students who are willing to return to a healthy choice even if they have been sexually active
-Increase the number of students who are sexually active who get tested for STDs
-Increase the number of sexually active students who get counseled by a medical professional in a clinical setting to use risk reducers consistently and correctly.
-Increase the number of students who have the knowledge and skills to have healthy relationships
Increase the number of students who value a lifetime committed monogamous love relationship commonly known as marriage.
Waiting until marriage is not a measureable goal and no one in our agency desires to be the sex police to follow a student to marriage. WAIT Training takes an incremental approach to behavior change and social norming.
Waiting until and in preparation for marraige IS the optimal health choice and a worthwhile health goal for some. However, calling it absurd is like calling the United Nations absurd. The goal of the United Nations is world peace, is it not? Have we EVER had world peace? No we have not...but it continues to be a noble and worthwhile goal.
What we are trying to accomplish is this.. approximately 40% (and in some communities it is 70 %) of babies are born into families where there is no marriage. Of the 60% that are born into marriages 50% of those marriages fracture and dissolve. A safe and stable home is something all children need.
This is becoming the social norm. Many of the students we serve do not even know they have the option to wait and be loved and cherished. We are trying to teach them soemthing called success sequenceing. We used to know this instinctively. Remember this? Dick and Jane sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. That is not a jingle our children learn any more.
If we are going to do the best we can do for a child's sake, the emperical data is robust and plentiful, that to reduce poverty, drama, disease and dysfunction, we must be helpful in creating safe and stable homes and families.
I am sorry you felt like you were being bullied into stating your name. That was not my intent. I now understand you have your reasons for staying anonymous.
Respectfully submitted: Joneen Mackenzie RN
Joneen, I have someone in mind to teach her all those things. ME. Thanks but no thanks. Financial literacy? Really? You're all experts at that too? You're program is designed to teach young people to WAIT until they're married to have sex. Are you denying that's the main purpose? The average age of first marriage today is 26 or 27 Joneen. Even for those young people who do get married you're placing absurd expectations on them. I've seen first hand the pain and anguish of a man in his late twenties who was struggling with this. Maybe you don't realize that girls in Biblical times typically married when they were just 13. Waiting until marriage then was pretty easy I think we could agree. I find you wanting to teach my daughter this ancient custom in our modern world absurd. And BTW I'm not going to let you bully me into giving you my name. I've had MANY disagreements with people on this board and I don't recall anyone calling me out like this. I have my reasons for remaining anonymous and most people seem to respect that.
She can learn all those things and more without your silly little program. I have no doubt you believe in what you're doing, but the scope of what you teach and how you teach it is too limited and burdened with harmful stereotypes for what some people want for their young ones.
"Prove it."
And with that asinine statement you have proven Heather well-justified in ignoring you. How utterly 19th century. But here's a brief article in case you want to persist in acting like a social throwback.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/318/7175/41
Women's sexual desire is a real health issue and you can bet your hind end it's relevant.
(You might also want to look up 'Derailing for Dummies' to gain an understanding of how and why your tactics are being recognized for what they are).
No one is saying that anyone has a 'right to adopt' except you. That's something you made up and it isn't the issue. The issue is that the Catholic church does not have a 'religious' right to discriminate. The problem was that the Catholic church refused to even consider gay and lesbian couples who were willing to provide stable, loving homes for hard to place children and they refused despite the fact that the state of MA had a non-discrimination clause in the legally binding contract The Church had signed. In other words (and please pay attention to the title of the original post) The Church was/is claiming itself was/is above the law. You appear to be arguing that The Church should be above the law, should be allowed to discriminate on 'religious' grounds' AND force the rest of us to pay for it. good luck with that.
I must say that this business of trying to cover up your and your church's ignorance and bigotry by using disabled folks as a shield is a rhetorical habit you have which I find fairly disgusting.
The only difference between the American anti-abortion movement and the Taliban is about 8,000 miles.
Dr Warren Hern, MD
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You have to know that I every time buy essays
or written essay choosing essay writing services
and people purchase essay writing close to this good topic . Thus, thanks a lot for the hot topic!
Dear Anonymous99,
How sad for your daughter that you will not allow her to learn the science of healthy relationships, the stages of attachment, the stages of commitment, the steps of intimacy, the multi-dimensions of building intimacy with herself and others, identifying her love language, helping her find her voice in relation to communicating feelings and setting boundaries, valuing her amazing personality;learning how to be intentional as she decides rather than slides into relationships, life mapping, conflict resolution, creative problem solving, decsion making, dealing with peer pressure,strategies to aviod drugs and alcohol, media and financial literacy and partner selection strategies. These are just some of the few life skills your daughter would learn in WAIT Training.
How would you know what my views are? Do you know me? Have you read through the curriculum? Have you talked with parents and students who have been through it? Do
you know the research behind the development of this program? Have you made an effort to educate yourself? From the angry tone of this blog entry, it would seem to me that the answers to these questions are a resounding NO.
Now... who is being dogmatic, unbending, intolerant, discriminatory and judgmental?
If you would really like to have a dialogue rather than sounding shrill, I suggest you be courageous and state your name rather than being annoymous.
Respectfully submitted: Joneen Mackenzie RN